New Chechen leader orders probe of Russian police's alleged abuses

March 18, 2007|By David Holley, Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW — Russian federal police in war-battered Chechnya regularly engage in torture of detainees, the republic's Kremlin-backed president declared as he announced a criminal investigation into the alleged abuse.

President Ramzan Kadyrov, whose own Chechen forces have faced frequent allegations of human-rights abuses, including kidnappings, torture and murder, singled out a detention facility known as ORB-2 run by the Russian Interior Ministry in Urus-Martan.

"The situation at the Operative and Investigative Bureau No. 2 . . . where detainees are systematically subjected to torture is totally unacceptable," Kadyrov told journalists Friday in the Chechen capital, Grozny, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

"The problem of tortures at the bureau has always been raised, everybody has complaints against the agency, and we must solve the problem because the torture and humiliation there are a blatant violation of human rights," Kadyrov said. "The Chechen prosecutor's office has launched a criminal case into torture at the bureau in the town of Urus-Martan."

Spokesmen for the Russian Interior Ministry in Moscow and Chechnya declined to comment on Kadyrov's allegations.

Tatyana Kasatkina, executive director of Memorial, a human-rights center in Moscow, said abuses at ORB-2 are so well known that it might have become impossible for Kadyrov to ignore them.

"We know of many cases when people were subjected to horrendous torture in that place," Kasatkina said. "Those people were beaten into giving false evidence. We have been trying for a long time to attract the attention of the world community to those facts. . . . It is a good thing that the Chechen government began talking about that too."

Kasatkina said she believed that Kadyrov, who won the region's top post early in March, might have addressed the issue in a bid to demonstrate his concern for the safety of Chechens and raise his prestige among ordinary citizens. He also might be making a bid to further increase his power, she said.

"ORB-2 is not subordinated to him, so maybe this is a factor too," she said. "If Kadyrov wants among other things to raise his ratings by paying attention to those issues, that would be quite a good thing, actually."

Kadyrov, the son of a former president of the republic of Chechnya who was assassinated in 2004, previously had served as prime minister. He turned 30, the minimum age for the presidency, in October.

During the first Chechnya war, from 1994 to 1996, Kadyrov and his father, Akhmad, joined separatist rebels who won de facto self-rule for the Russian republic. The two men switched to the pro-Moscow side when Russian forces returned to Chechnya in 1999, launching the second Chechnya war.

Musa Muradov, a Chechnya analyst with the Kommersant daily newspaper, said Kadyrov "wants to get rid of a federal organization, which is not subordinated to him, and at the same time to accuse this organization of all the bad things which take place in Chechnya."